The evolution of your success lies at the centre of your co-authorship network

PLoS One. 2015 Mar 11;10(3):e0114302. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0114302. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Collaboration among scholars and institutions is progressively becoming essential to the success of research grant procurement and to allow the emergence and evolution of scientific disciplines. Our work focuses on analysing if the volume of collaborations of one author together with the relevance of his collaborators is somewhat related to his research performance over time. In order to prove this relation we collected the temporal distributions of scholars' publications and citations from the Google Scholar platform and the co-authorship network (of Computer Scientists) underlying the well-known DBLP bibliographic database. By the application of time series clustering, social network analysis and non-parametric statistics, we observe that scholars with similar publications (citations) patterns also tend to have a similar centrality in the co-authorship network. To our knowledge, this is the first work that considers success evolution with respect to co-authorship.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Authorship*
  • Bibliometrics
  • Cooperative Behavior*
  • Databases, Bibliographic
  • Humans
  • Publications* / statistics & numerical data
  • Science*

Grants and funding

The work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the National Science Program (TIN2010-20797, EEBB-I-13-06425); the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Galician Regional Government under agreement for funding the Atlantic Research Center for Information and Communication Technologies (AtlantTIC); and the Spanish Government and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under project TACTICA. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.